Column : A few good men, like Nilekani
Dhiraj Nayyar
Posted: Thursday, Aug 05, 2010 at 2145 hrs
The Financial Express
he government of India is an interesting creature, possessed with an impressive posse of clever people and interesting ideas, but woefully inadequate when it comes to actually getting things done. The shambolic preparations for the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi are a most startling (but hardly only) example of how badly the government and its affiliated agencies execute key projects.
What the government really needs are people in the top echelons who can be efficient project managers. Politicians don’t perform this role in any country and generally restrict themselves to policymaking. In India, unfortunately, because of the attraction of pecuniary gains from project execution, politicians do often jump into a domain that doesn’t belong to them. Senior administrators from the civil bureaucracy who ought to be responsible for project execution have proved to be inadequate at the task, distracted by turf wars, satisfied with penning lengthy policy notes, and usually attempting to appease their interfering political masters.
One man in UPA-2, though, has emerged to defy the stereotypes, and is growing nicely into the role of the government’s project manager-in-chief, the man who can actually get things done: Nandan Nilekani.
Nilekani is, of course, the chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), an agency set up by the government to provide unique identity numbers (with biometric checks) to each of India’s 1.2 billion people. That in itself is a massive project, unprecedented in scale by any global standard. But just over a year into that office, Nilekani’s services are being sought by various arms of the government to assist with the execution of other crucial projects. Three of his forays outside the strict boundaries of the UIDAI, in particular, deserve a mention.
The former Infosys co-chairman, in a lesser known avatar, is also the chairman of the government’s Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAGUP), set up to recommend roadmaps to roll out five key government projects, including the struggling New Pension Scheme (NPS) and the much awaited GST. In fact, the existence of credible IT system to administer GST can actually help the finance minister in his political battle with the states who remain suspicious about the revenue collection potential of GST and the fair distribution of the revenues between Centre and states. A credible IT system can ensure efficient collection, minimise compliance costs and ensure an uncontroversial sharing of revenues even if the tax (Centre + state) is levied...